Books

Just looked at my reading pile, I have some 9 books to read. One of them I have now had for more than half a year and have only looked at the first page!

The book in question is about a 1000 pages long and is the sequel to a book that I enjoyed very much, but for some reason or other I just don't seem to pick it up when selecting a new book to read.

Funny that.....

Reading

I have read another book, it is one that I have been on the look out for for a few years now and its called Grouch & Me and its by Groucho Marx.

It was worth the wait to get the chance to read it, as he writes to some extent how I would expect him to speak, he has been dead quite a few years it was great to hear him again after all this time.

Was the book worth the wait?

Yes

Stephen Baxter

I am reading the very latest book by Stephen Baxter that has been published in hardback. Called Stone Spring and it's so I am told part 1 of a trilogy, I am wondering what the other books in the series are going to be called.

Now knowing just how long the publishing pipeline is has Stephen already written part 3?

I notice that a lot of his books now days feature things going badly wrong for the main characters in the books, I wonder why this change.

I know that authors move on, but some times I wonder if the books that they are having to write are being dictated to by the publisher and not what the authors muse wants.

It would I think be interesting to find out from more than one author if this is indeed true, I think personally that the answer will be more towards the fact that the publisher has to make a profit to stay in business and so an author like Stephen Baxter will have to be more flexible and open to the idea that commercial books are the way to go if he still wants to be published, with the coming of e books there may be a way of having some stories published that way that would not have been published in paper form.

It goes without saying that paper books will never go away and that there will always be a need for books in paper form. E books are going to be there in the market place but they will not take over the whole of the book publishing business.

Anyway I got off the track just a bit I just wonder if Stephen Baxter is ever going to do any hi science fiction stories in his Xeee universe? or has he moved on to other things that now get his writing muse more interested.

Reading

I have had some free time, well leave. I managed to do some reading this first post is about the first book that I read.

Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson.

Not too much too say other than its a great book and I can see why it has sold more than 1 million copies, based on the qi shows some of the items in the book made me think how much stuff you think you know that is wrong.

Well worth the read.

Books

I have just done a quick count on the books that I have in my to read pile, it stands at 6!

Which for me is a lot, 1 of the books is 1500 pages long.

At this rate I don't think I will need to buy a new book until 2010.

Podcast

Did I tell you that I have a podcast?

No?

Well I have one, it goes back to last year, I am sorry to say that I have not been very active with it as some how or other I end up with no time and a quite place to record the thing.

I have worked out 2 years plus worth of shows if I do a 5 to 30 minute show one a fortnight. I have even got outline for some of the shows done (see I can get some things done, sometimes even books, actually I have so far written 10 books each more than 300 pages A4 size all non fiction)

I have started to wonder if i could do the podcast on my mobile then transfer it sad I know....


You want to know the name of the podcast well it's AE35 and if you do a Google you should find it, I did (ha ha) as I write this I have only done 5 shows so far, one of them lasts just 4 minutes or so ( do you know how hard it is to talk into a microphone?) with luck I will sort myself out and get some more shows done. It goes without saying that I have not told anyone but this blog about the shows, and the other thing is that I have the shows hosted for me on a site that has nothing to do with Dirk Maggs or James Follett.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 5

Update time.

The bad news

Nothing has been done since the last post.

Have been too busy being educated in the delights of safe systems of work for things that go very bang.

There is hope that I shall have some free time soon, and then hopefully there will then be some progrss.

Dirk Maggs Book Part 4

I re looked at all the drafts that I have so far done, and I don't think I have missed anything out, that I don't know of. The next few weeks in real life are going to be busy so I know that I will not have the time to work on the next draft chapter.

The plan is still for the book to be done and printed by Dec 2008, as the book is going to be a private printing, the only way that you will se a copy is if you know me or you are Dirk Maggs.

Maggs Book Part 3

Update time

The news is that there has not been any more work done on the book. This due to real life getting in the way and me not having the time to get my head around the next chapter that has to be done in draft format first.

Maybe in the next few weeks there will be time.

Maggs Book part 2

An update on what has been going on with this years book project. Last time I said that I had done the draft for all work done in 1988.

Progress has not been good as I have been away doing training with IOSH on a course that I have already done before, but as company policy is that every member of staff will do this course even if you have already done it.

So back to the book, and I can say that the draft chapter for all work done in 1989 has also been done and it runs to 15 pages of A4.

I do not yet know just how big this book is going to be, but it looks like it will be large, even without photos.

Maggs Book

As you may or may not know I have a website, that is on a well known radio director called Dirk Maggs. In fact at this time it is the only website on a radio director and has been for the last 5 years!

The website has over time just got bigger, as Dirk creates new shows or I find out about old shows that he has done.

I have decided as the website is a living thing in that it only exsits as loads of electrons that I would produce a book of the website.

This I have done edition one of the the book was done last year, and had some 300 odd pages, edition two was produced late last year with no pictures in it as there are copyright problems and also cos it did not always print correctly.

So this years project is to do edition 3 of the book.

There are no plans to make the book avaiable to the public as I think I break lots of copyright rules, but there is nothing to stop me producing it for myself and maybe give a copy to Dirk.

So progress so far has been that I have found a templete for the book and have taken a copy of all of the website pages that would and do make sense to have in the printed format.

I have managed to layout the book so that each year is a chapter, then within each chapter each production from that year is then listed.

The first draft of the year 1988 has been done and it runs to 10 A4 pages!

Wikis & Books

Wikis & Books

As you may or may not know I have more than one wiki that I am playing with. One is the new James Follett Wiki (JFW) the other far older wiki is called DMP and has over the years been restarted on more than one occasion, mainly due to errors on my part that resulted in me destroying the database and all the backups! (don't ask)

At one stage the DMP had been about 1000 pages in size at this time its around 600, but then I have not worked on it for some time, in fact it is one of those projects that I only seem to work on when I remember that I have got such a project!

The size that I think DMP will get to is at this time 2000 to 2500 pages as the subject of the DMP is Dirk Maggs the radio director that I have spoken about many times here before. In fact I have also spoken about the DMP here many times normally when all was going well and not so well.

Now DMP is a project that for the reasons I have given above will not be updated on its software or the database that drivers it, as I have lost too much too often.

The DMP is again like the JFA a closed wiki very closed in fact I have at this time no intention of allowing anyone access to it even Dirk Maggs, not because there is anything in it that is libeler's but because I used it to create the main Dirk Maggs site, and also because it is the main data-bank for Dirk Maggs. I have used once so far to write a book on all of Dirk's works form 1988 to 2006 it cam e to a 300 page A4 book!

Yes I can tell you I was surprised at how long it was. I reckon that Dirk will be active in radio for at least another 5 to 7 years before he decides to go and do something else, so at the rate of productions that he does a year I think the book could end up at a 1000 pages! how mad is that.

The book is not for sale as it break every copyright law there is, eg there are photo's that I just don't know who owns the copyright to, there are articles that I do not have permission to use. But and this is the big but as this book is based on the website and the DMP from early 2006 the idea was to have a paper record just in case the website or the DMP vanish, which if my passed experience is anything to go by could happen at any moment. So I have a paper copy and the file that made it is stored else where in more than one location.

I also think that the book would not sell very many copies as it is too specialist, just how many folks want to know which actor started in a radio show that has never been heard since it was first broadcast back in 1989?

Website Book

As you may or may not already know I have a website that lists alll the work the producer & Director Dirk Maggs has done. As I was looking for a writing project I thought it would be a good idea to produce a book from the contents of the website.

Little did I know what I was letting myself in for, as the book is some 300 pages long when using an A4 layout. The bigest single cause of %%$^%$$ has been Microsoft Word, which for some reason was falling over. I do not understand why as I have written a much larger book and did not have much if any trouble. In fact the last book that I wrote had 26 pages of contents so that should give you some idea as to how large that book was.

Anyway as I was saying the current book is 310 pages of A$ with 6 pages of contents and a file size of 6 Megs. The only thing that I can think of that is making word fall over is the picture that are in the book.

So as I said at the start of this the book is nearly done and I must admit that it has been over a month in doing the conversion from web pages to word or text pages, this was a surprize to me as I thought the task would have taken much less time.

So all I now have to do is get the page numbering right spell check it and then convert it to a PDF file and upload to my Lulu page, I will report back on progress.

Williams Audio Challenge 1

This is the first of several audio challenges that I have for all producers of audio or radio like content, the idea behind each challenge to stretch what is being done in audio entertainment, as I have noticed that over the last few years most radio/audio or broadcast entertainment is becoming mediocre normally because the folks commissioning work are short of imagination, money or have caught political correctness.

The first challenge will be to use the Destiny's Children series written by Stephen Baxter as an audio series which at this time is a series of four books.

Book One

is called Coalescent is a science-fiction novel by Stephen Baxter. It is part one of the Destiny's Children series.

The novel is set in two different time periods: modern Britain, when George Poole finds that he has a previously unknown sister and follows a trail to a mysterious and ancient organisation in Rome (Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins); and the time of Regina, a girl growing up during the ending of Roman rule in Britain, around AD 400.

Book Plot Summary

The book is comprised of four distinct parts. The primary purpose of part one is the introduction of the characters, in ancient Britain and the present. Part two introduces a modern first-person view of the Order in Rome while following Regina's budding legacy centuries before. Part three hosts the clash and resolution of Poole and the Order's realities. Part four is a look eons into Humanity's Expansion into the Universe and provides a conclusion in George Poole's present.

George Poole

George Poole copes with the mid-life crisis of losing his father. He meets Peter McLachlan, an eccentric member of an online free-thinking group called the Slan(t)ers. George Poole uncovers an old picture showing a sister he never knew. Poole also discovers that his father regularly donated large sums of money to an organisation called the "Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins". Combined with a sense of futility in determining his future and encouragement from both his former wife Linda and Peter, Poole decides to uncover the mystery of his missing sister.

Poole leaves England to visit his sister Gina in Florida for information, despite their strained relationship. After spoiling his clever nephews as well as clashing with his distant sister Gina, Poole extracts the contact of a Jesuit priest in Rome and his own retired grandfather in Florida. Poole learns from his grandfather, Lou Casella, that his twin sister was given to the ancient Order when Poole's parents were unexpectedly landed with twins.

Regina

Born into a wealthy mosaic-designing family of 5th-century Roman Britain, seven-year-old Regina is uprooted from her comfortable villa due to her Father's death and the Roman Empire's withdrawal. The Roman Empire loses its strength in Britain as invading Saxons pummel the Great Wall north of Roman settlements to where Regina and her grandfather Aetius relocated. Aetius dies after losing control over his unpaid mutinous soldiers.

Regina seeks refuge with her servant Cartumandua's relatives in Verulamium but is betrayed by Regina's boyfriend Amator who rapes and abandons her. Verulamium burns down, forcing Regina and Cartumandua's family to live off the land in poverty for over sixteen years. Regina kills a roaming Saxon who nearly rapes her daughter, Brica. This event convinces Regina, the leader of their hamlet, to accept the invitation of warlord Artorius (King Arthur) to help restore order to Britain again.

Main Characters

Lucia

In modern Rome, Lucia, a fifteen-year old scribe for the Order, is devastated when she begins to menstruate — unlike any of her friends and colleagues within the Order. Once this is discovered Lucia is initiated into in her new role within the Order. Meanwhile, Lucia falls in love with seventeen-year-old American Daniel Stannard despite what is expected of her. After giving birth following only three months of pregnancy, Lucia never sees her baby again. Emotionally unstable, she runs away with Daniel.

Regina

Back in 5th-century Britain, Regina establishes her life working with Artorius, eventually managing his kingdom's record keeping. Artorius takes Regina as his wife for symbolic and moral reasons. She disdains Artorius' barbaric practices and thirst for conquest. Regina accompanies Artorius to a War Council where she realizes to stay attached with the reckless Artorius would mean certain doom for her progeny. In order to search out her mother, Julia, Regina secures passage to Rome by allowing herself and her daughter to give sexual favours to a wealthy merchant named Ceawlin.

Upon arriving in Rome, Regina contacts Amator, now openly homosexual and a wealthy bakery owner, and demands recompense for abandoning her and her family. Regina re-establishes contact with her mother, Julia, after a cool reunion. Regina joins the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, a Christian-adapted faction of the Vestal Virgins located on the Appian Way — an organisation that her family has become intimate with. Regina's leadership revives the ageing Order by converting it into a successful private school. Years later, on the night following her daughter's marriage, the Sack of Rome in 455 by the Vandals occurs. Regina's foresight saves the Order when the women and children are evacuated into the underground Catacombs she had had dug for a sanctuary.

In Regina's twilight years, she establishes important rules precedents for the Order. Unnecessary and unsupportable births are prohibited. A handful of mothers must dedicate their lives to replenishing the Order with births. Before her death in 476 AD, Regina establishes three main rules to govern the Order:

• Sisters matter more than daughters.
• Ignorance is strength.
• Listen to your sisters.

In the centuries following Regina's death, the Order assists the poor, robbed, and injured, gaining donations to its coffers from the occasional assisted person who became wealthy. Another Crypt that developed similarly to the Order is found and plans made for its eradication and occupation. In 1537 the Order survives the pillage of Rome by Antipope Clement VII by sacrificing five of its members to rape and death in order to divert Clement and his men's attention from an entrance to the Crypt.

George Poole

Meanwhile, in the present, George Poole, followed by a nervous Peter McLachlan, has a cool reunion with his lost sister Rosa. Rosa gives George a tour of the Crypt, the Order's secret human cache. Peter speculates with George about evidence of intelligent dark matter life moving through earth. Daniel serendipitously meets with George Poole, who is searching for additional information about the Order. Daniel, George Poole, and Peter take the very pregnant Lucia to a hospital where Peter becomes suspicious of the mysterious Order. The Order promptly retrieves Lucia from the hospital but not before Peter and George learn that most of the Crypt's inhabitants remain prepubescent indefinitely (reproductive suppression).

George Poole convinces his Jesuit priest contact to grant Peter access to ancient Catholic records. George's patriarchal roots are traced to a surveyor named George Pool who came to Rome in 1863. George returns to the Crypt looking for information and finds himself smothered with the familiar smell and contact of those in the Crypt, all of whom share his similar facial features (namely, cloudy grey eyes). His sister Rosa almost persuades him to become assimilated into the Order as a stud but an urgent text message by Peter brings him to his senses.

Peter has a theory explaining the strange peculiarities of the Order. The Order is a family of eusocial humans that evolved from the intense pressures to survive the various conquerings of Rome over the centuries. He cites naked mole rats as an example of eusocial behaviour in mammals. He explains how Regina's three rules result in a "genetic mandate for eusociality." He calls the Order a "human hive" and labels them "Coalescents" — a new kind of human. Peter then suddenly leaves after receiving a text message.

Days later, George learns that Peter has invaded the Crypt and is threatening to set off Semtex plastic explosives in order to expose the Order. Peter and the Slan(t)ers are responsible for the recent bombing of a San Jose research facility investigating quantum gravity technology — under the belief that a higher intelligence would notice the manipulation of space-time and eradicate a possible threat to their superiority. Peter's reasoning in exposing the Crypt is that the Order does not exist for any purpose except for itself. It threatens to destroy humanity as individuals and replace it with mindless drones. Peter Mclachlan then detonates his bombs and dies. George begins the evacuation of the Crypt and the mob of drones emerge hive-like from the crater in the middle of Via Cristoforo Colombo.

Book 2

is called Exultant much of this book is written as large sections of prose explaining theoretical exotic-matter physics. Baxter also sketches the evolution of the Xeelee and an imaginary history of the universe in which life is ubiquitous even under the most extreme conditions.

Book Plot Summary

Exultant is set in Baxter's “Xeelee Sequence” twenty thousand years into the Third Expansion of Mankind, “ a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind's near extinction.” The human-supremacist Intirim Coalition of Governance has conquered almost the whole Milky Way all but the alien Xeelee concentrated at the galactic core around a supermassive black hole called Chandra. The mysterious Xeelee are far more advanced but less numerous than the humans, and the war has been at a stalemate for three millenia even though the entire Coalition has been directed toward the war effort and ten billion humans die at the front every year. In a war fought with faster-than-light technology (i.e. time travel), each side has foreknowledge of the other's actions and can develop counter-measures to plans before they are made.

Pirius is a fighter pilot stationed at the front. When a battle turns to disaster for the Coalition forces, he disobeys suicide orders to stand and fight, choosing instead to risk survival. In a desperate gamble to outrun a pursuing Xeelee, Pirius captures a Xeelee fighter for the first time in history. Returning to base via FTL travel, he arrives two years previous to the battle, when his younger self is still a cadet. Rather than being lauded as a hero, both instances of Pirius are court-martialed for disobeying orders.

Commissary Nilis of the Office of Technological Archival and Control, part of the Commission for Historical Truth, defends both the older Pirius (whom he calls “Pirius Blue”) and the younger one (“Pirius Red”) but loses the trial. Pirius Blue is sent to a penal unit at the front as a foot soldier, and Pirius Red is remanded to the custody of Commissary Nilis, who has plans for the fruits of Pirius Blue's battlefield victory. Using the Xeelee fighter and the innovative tactics that saved Pirius Blue, he starts to plan an unheard of assault on the Xeelee's primary stronghold at Chandra itself.

While Nilis and his new team struggle to confront ossified government and military institutions, they try to understand and to develop new and sometimes alien technologies: FTL computers, a gravastar shield to protect them from FTL foreknowledge, and a black hole gun, capable of disrupting a supermassive black hole's event horizon.

Meanwhile, in the course of his new duties to Commissary Nilis, Pirius Red is practically taken on a tour of the Solar system and some of the Coalition's most scandalous secrets, rife with references to events from previous books in the Xeelee sequence.

Finally, Pirius Red and Blue are reluctantly reunited for the assault on Chandra that could end the war, but the black hole hasn't given up all its secrets yet.

Book Three

is called Transcendent it is the third science fiction novel in the Destiny's Children series by Stephen Baxter.

The story alternates between the world of Michael Poole in the year 2047, and Alia, a posthuman girl who lives approximately half a million years in the future.

Engineer Michael Poole is recovering from the death of Morag, his pregnant wife. Poole works as a consultant designing space propulsion systems, and dreams of being able to one day explore the stars. However, there are more pressing matters; humanity faces a serious bottleneck, with the Earth reeling from the anthropogenic effects of global warming; automobile production has all but ceased, except for hydrogen-based mass transit, and air travel is limited to the very rich. Due to climate change, the oceans have become dead zones, with rising sea levels and severe weather displacing millions.

While working in Siberia, Michael's son Tom is injured by an explosion of methane gas from previously frozen hydrates, suddenly released from the now-melting tundra. Michael begins to research whether this is an isolated incident or the beginning of something more serious. With the help of an artificial sentience named Gea, he discovers that a potential release of all such frozen greenhouse gasses could destabilize the environment enough to make the Earth untenable for human habitation, in a repeat of the Permian extinction.

Michael consults members of the Poole family, who come together to work on the problem. Tom, John, and the elderly George (star of Coalescent), reunite, and a maverick geoengineering company funds the project. Michael designs a subsurface refrigeration system that could stabalize the frozen hydrates. Meanwhile, Michael continues to be haunted by visions of his dead wife, apparitions he has been seeing his entire life, even before he first met her. He becomes obsessed with discovering the origin of this phenomenon, and his quest for answers drives a wedge between him and his family. Aunt Rosa Poole (from Coalescent), a Catholic priest and ex-member of the Order, helps Michael research the problem, drawing on her vast knowledge, stemming in small part from her relationship with the Coalescent hive and its historical archives. The rest of the Poole family joins the investigation when Morag appears during a trial test of the engineering project. This time, everyone sees Morag, even observing drones recording the event. After the project is bombed by a terrorist group, Morag goes from being an apparition to reincarnating in physical reality. This frightens everyone, even Michael.

500,000 years in the future, the Nord, a generation ship, sails through the galaxy carrying Alia, a young girl, and her family. As part of a government program called the "Redemption", Alia is obligated to witness the life of Michael Poole, from start to finish. Pressured by her family to leave the ship, Alia becomes a candidate for the Transcendence, a collective group of immortal posthumans who are attempting to evolve into a form of godhood, in effect leaving their humanity behind. After travelling the galaxy and observing several posthuman life forms, Alia travels to Earth to meet the Transcendence. Alia learns the Transcendence is attempting to redeem the past suffering of all humans, first by witnessing every single one as Alia witnessed, then by living as every single human and experiencing everything that they experienced. However, since observing is not seen as sufficient for redemption, the Transcendence ultimately desires to erase all suffering in the past, thereby ensuring that every human that could have existed does so. Lastly, if that is seen as too great a task, the Transcendence is prepared to reach back in time and stop humans from ever existing, thereby "erasing" the suffering that they intend to redeem.

Upset about the goals of the Transcendence, Alia makes her way back to the Nord, only to find that it has been attacked in an attempt to get her to go back and face the Transcendence by a group who believes the Redemption is a mistake. Upon returning to the Transcendence, Alia agrees to find a human who can join the Transcendence long enough to debate the Redemption and help them find the best course of action. To do so, Alia projects herself into the past, to the time of Michael Poole. She appears to him as his dead wife, but changes into her true form, that of a small, hairy primate, a form evolved for low gravity environments.

Alia convinces Michael to face the Transcendence. After an initial period of adjustment, Michael makes contact with the Transcendence. Able to see both sides of the argument, Michael forgives the Transcendence for their meddling, but asks that they stop their efforts. Michael is returned to his own time, where he successfully completes the refrigeration project. The Kuiper anomaly, first introduced in Coalescent, disappears, and is revealed to be related to Alia's connection with Michael, having first appeared in the solar system at the time of Michael's birth. In the far future, the Transcendence collapses and the Witnessing program is shut down.

Book Four

is called Resplendent It is the fourth and final book in Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children series.

This book is a collection of short stories relating to the previous three books, comprising new works and previously-published stories, including the novellas Reality Dust and Riding the Rock.

These books are hard science fiction with a very large canvas and some very large and complex ideas.

This will be a large and difficult task as the books cover a lot of ground. I don't think that one book can be made into one episode of audio or radio. So either a lot of the contents of each book gets dropped or each book takes 120 minutes of air time each.

So for the four books that works out at 480 minutes or some 8 hours of airtime at an estimated cost of 5K per hour this comes to some 40K which is a large investment and is a 8 week, 1 hour a week broadcast schedule.

The series could be more expensive as it depends on just how many voices are needed for each episode.

The other way to look at this challenge is to decide that it is not for radio broadcast but for a podcast instead. the high production values are still required but there is now unlimited airtime as a podcast. A possible route for paying is the only snag as iTunes and such like do tend to charge a large premium for hosting the files a figure that I have seen said that it was 15% but I do not know if that figure is still correct things may have changed so it might not be true.

This is a big challenge as the Coalescent books are vast in their scope but an Audio Movie would be the only way to do the stories in the series any justice. A film on only one of the books would only be possible if most of the contents of the books was cut or changed in ways that the Author Stephen Baxter would like or want.